Home Events Arts Visual Arts

The Arc of the Capital Area is once again joining forces with its dog therapy partner, Divine Canines, to host this virtual art auction featuring original pet-inspired art created by local artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Artwork sales will benefit the student artists, as well as virtual programs provided by The Arc of the Capital Area to Central Texans with disabilities. A portion of the proceeds from the event will go to Divine Canines to help them continue free dog therapy services. You can browse the artwork and merchandise and start bidding now.

Use your smartphone to access self-guided tours of the outdoor public art sited by UT's award-winning Landmarks program any time you feel like it. BONUS: There's also a free, docent-led tour starting at Marc Quinn's "Spiral of the Galaxy" (1501 Red River) on Sun., Jan. 8, 11am.

Madeline Hollander's Score for Seven Solos revisits a project she first realized in 2017: A selection of retired AFD fire hoses extended across UTVAC's gallery floor, assuming a new function as a site-responsive choreographic score awaiting interpretation. Then, a group of student dancers responded to the repurposed objects through improvisational movements. Now, documentation of these performances can be viewed from the VAC's south lawn.

Visit mid-century Hollywood without leaving Austin through an up-close view of these Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio assets. This first-ever public viewing of 12 historic Golden Age of Film backdrops provides a look into the nearly lost art of hand-painted Hollywood scenic art. Bonus: Re-creations of other backdrops in the collection, as painted by UT scenic art students training with Karen Maness. And, look: Robert Faires reports on the show right here.

Inspired by stories of nature regenerating and reclaiming space during the Covid-19 pandemic, Manik Raj Nakra's W I L D L I F E show examines what happens when humanity removes itself from the natural world. The exhibition also introduces a new material for the artist: The ceremonial bindi, worn for centuries on the forehead in Indian culture for spiritual, traditional, and fashion reasons.

Since the early days of her art practice, Rebecca Rothfus Harrell has been influenced by the American Precisionists of the 1920s and '30s – particularly their approach to spatial organization, dimensional & time flattening, and selective realism. And now? "I've been documenting what I identify as the primary signifier of the state of flux across the country," says Harrell. "An empty sign hanging askew above a bolted front door, a familiar shaped frame with exposed bulbs towering over the defunct gas station or the torn fabric of a shop sign exposing the supports intended to hold it taut. I find these structures visually and conceptually captivating." We reckon, the way the artist has rendered these images, you will, too. Book a visit right here.

Inspired by the Mexican American Cultural Center's annual La Mujer celebration – and by the first feminist of the New World, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz – this online group exhibit is curated by April Garcia and features womxn-identifying and nongender-specific artists whose artwork is tied to activism, feminism, cultural. and gender identity storytelling, environmental protection, and socioeconomic parity.

When an image is stripped of its clarity, we are left with two things: an allusion to something familiar and the viewer's interpretation. These provocative new works by Nate Szarmach explore the space between image and interpretation, uncovering the ways that familiar religious imagery, cultural christianity, and personal history influence our spirituality. Our Robert Faires reviews the show right here.

This is a collection of works created by artists at Flatbed whose practice has focused entirely on non-objective abstraction, the exhibition curated out of the studio's deep archive of works from the 30 years they've operated as a collaborative print studio in Austin. "It might seem as if each artist has developed a new language that speaks perfectly to us without translation. As music can transcend words, so visual abstraction transcends audible language as well." Including works by Taiko Chandler (Denver, CO), Ann Conner (Wilmington, NC), John Robert Craft (Clarendon, TX,) Anna Craycroft (New York, NY), Anthony DiMichele (Friday Bay, WA), Winston Lee Mascarenhas (Dallas, TX), Denny McCoy (Wimberley, TX), Samson Mnisi (Johannesburg, South Africa), Greg Murr (Berlin, Germany), John OBuck (New York, NY), John Pavlicek (Houston, TX), Larry Scholder (Dallas, TX), Joe Segal (St. Augustine, FL), Bettie Ward (Santa Fe, NM), and Joan Winter (Dallas, TX).

Bucky Miller – artist, writer, recipient of the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship – has exhibited in solo shows at Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum and more, and his work's also been featured in publications like n+1, Der Greif, The Believer, and Glasstire. He says: "The photographs and other things in 'Slow Season' constitute a love note to friends about the very reasonable joys of slow and sporadic attentiveness. When lost in the fog, it helps to pause. Unhurried, there is room for puppet theater. Do not worry: It will be clear the puppets were an asset once things get moving again."

This is out in Buda, yes – but it's Leslie Kell. The digital artist presents her works from the Other Side collection and her mesmerizing video art. Bonus: Art in a diversity of mediums by Lisa Zinna, Chalda Maloff, Caroline Walker, Paul McGuire, and Ronald Gross.

This local treasure of a venue, run by those Contemporary Austin folks who also bring us the Jones Center shows Downtown, is all about the outdoors – which is perfect for these trickily navigated times of ours, n'est-ce pas? Recommended: Stop by and breathe in the air, enjoy the lawns and gardens and the many examples of world-class sculpture arrayed across the property, and (as Frankie used to say) r-e-l-a-x.

Through painting, drawing, video, and performance, Andrea Muñoz Martinez invites people to contemplate the beauty that exists in a land where people negotiate their place, where people thrive and struggle, and where people resist the idea of unjust borders: Borderlandia. Here's Robert Faires' review of the show.

Mexic-Arte Museum presents an exhibition of selections from the Juan Antonio Sandoval Jr. collection, an array of work that is considered one of the most important Latinx art collections in the United States.

To celebrate the beauty of the Texas State Flower, the Neill-Cochran House Museum is displaying a collection of local art inspired by the bluebonnet.

This is a group show by relay, begun in July of 2020 as a method of socially distancing a community in the height of the pandemic: Artists took turns alone in the space, each adding to the exhibition. Now, as it nears its close, the exhibition resembles a community in which work converses and overlaps. With Adreon Henry, Vy Ngo, Dawn Okoro, Leon Alesi, Matt Steinke, Sev Coursen, Stella Alesi, and more.

This collection of new work by illustrators and printmakers Aaron deGruyter and Tyler Winters Skaggs is a requiem for the Catholic-soaked Chihuahuan desert of the Mesilla Valley.

Leo Steinberg's wide-ranging scholarship addresses such canonical artists as Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns. Here the Blanton presents selections from the scholar's vast collection – an impressive array of highlights from the European printmaking tradition.

Austin-born and internationally acclaimed, Deborah Roberts critiques notions of beauty, the body, race, and identity in contemporary society through the lens of Black children. (Her first solo museum presentation in Texas, "I'm," is part of The Contemporary Austin's participation in the Feminist Art Coalition – a nationwide initiative of art institutions to generate awareness of feminist thought, experience, and action through exhibitions and events.) Norway's Torbjørn Rødland works with analog technology and readymade spaces to create photographs that render the everyday uncanny. His images blend the cool, seductive aestheticism of commercial and fashion photography with the layered complexity of a conceptual practice, resulting in ambivalent perspectives that both attract and repulse.

This place, ah, it's one of our favorite places in the entire city; and of course they're properly corona-closed. But check 'em out online right now – it's a rich, wonder-filled website – to whet your appetite for when things get back to … uh … are we still calling it "normal," these days?

The painter Joyce Howell’s palette is informed by nature and its flux between calm and chaos. She describes it as an ongoing conversation.

This is the third exhibition from WCC since its reopening last fall. "Provocateurs" provides a unique chance for visitors to see, discover, and collect internationally recognized artists like Raphael Mazzucco, Andy Warhol, Mickalane Thomas, the Connor Brothers, RETNA, Jenny Holzer, and more – in the context of a diverse show where power lies in the interpretation and the art dares to look back.

This is Ray Donley's gallery of art by Native Americans, located in that company of artistic glory called Canopy and resplendent with creations from the original people of our struggling country.